Call Me Zebra(24)
“Is that your final assessment?” I posed to myself.
“Yes, Ludo Bembo belongs in the upper echelons of the Pyramid of Exile,” I replied, “because unlike me, who has been betrayed repeatedly by the treacherous hands of history, Ludo Bembo has only been pushed in a westward direction once, leaving him a hop, skip, and a jump away from his hometown of Florence. I have had to travel in punctuated movements from East to West with such dizzying frequency that I remember nothing. No, not nothing,” I corrected. “Nothing except the shards of memory that shoot up at random from the swampy lagoons of my mind to pierce the surface of my consciousness with fresh wounds.”
Moments later, while hovering over the carousel at the baggage claim, I felt my father’s mind spinning inside my own. He was cobbling together sentences. He was funneling information to me from beyond the grave. I heard his voice, thin, wispy: The ruins of the world are hiding in plain sight, he whispered. Future exiles are perpetually manufactured in the factory of war. Just then, the chest-shaped suitcase that I had used to transport my dead father to his grave tumbled down the chute and landed on the shiny black conveyor belt. It looked like an abandoned body bag. I leaned over it, eager to reclaim the sorry remains of my past, but then something came over me, a kind of melancholy bemusement, and I stepped back to regard it affectionately as it whizzed around on the moving belt. I watched it spin. A bitter scent rose from my suitcase in wafts; it was the putrid odor of my father’s death. Each time I inhaled it, it burned my nose and caused my void to swell.
The carousel finally stopped spinning. The motors died down. I heard the stupid laugh of a child. I looked down. The laugh was being directed at me by a little girl in a pink dress. “This is a coffin!” I exclaimed to her, winking. She retreated behind her mother, who was standing next to her, and looked at me with a fixed and fearful eye.
I removed my suitcase from the carousel and dragged it across the floor. The automated doors pumped open. I heard them say: “Zebra, your father may be dead, your mother may be buried under a lone date palm in no-man’s-land, your ass may be rotting in the desert, but don’t forget that you have inherited a passport through the inky sweat of your father. Know your privilege. Welcome to the Grand Tour of Exile!”
Outside, Ludo Bembo, a multilingual man who spoke English with native fluency, was standing at the curb just as I had imagined he would be. He looked alert, at the ready, like a man who is always at his post. He was holding a sign that read: Here to reclaim José Emilio Morales’s friend. I searched his face. He was surprisingly good-looking. He had curly hair, round glasses, a Roman nose that reminded me of the flank of a mountain, a charming gap between his front teeth (he was smiling), and like the true and pedigreed gentleman he was, he had a pipe and a silk handkerchief tucked into the breast pocket of his suit jacket. I examined his aura. It had an antique veneer. It was the aura of a man whose energy field has been fattened with the residue of his literary ancestors, the Bembos.
He waved at me. I observed his hands. They were delicate, feminine, nimble. I imagined him running those hands over my legs. I imagined telling him the truth about my existence: that I, Zebra, alias Dame of the Void, am in worse condition than Dante the Pilgrim, because I have never encountered the straight way; my life has been crooked from the start, and that overexposure to grief has flattened my heart into a sheet of paper. It would have been an honest introduction. But something utterly strange came out of my mouth instead. My words were misshapen by a kind of nervous affliction. “Have you ever possessed me?” I asked, pointing at his sign.
He craned his neck over it. “Possessed you?” he echoed. Then he looked at me, and his pupils instinctively narrowed. He stepped back toward his car, a banged-up two-door 1980s Fiat. I heard him clear his throat. He adjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose. Then he gathered himself and reached out to shake my hand.
“I’m Ludovico Bembo. You can call me Ludo. It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said, employing a formal professorial tone. He leaned in and gave me two kisses.
In the space between our faces, I saw an infinite number of miniature Bembos. Those tiny men opened their mouths, and said, To wish is little; we must long with the utmost eagerness to gain our end. I recognized the quote. Ovid through Petrarch. I stepped forward. I was channeling Ludo’s points of reference.
“Technically speaking,” I said, pointing again at his sign, “you can only reclaim something if you’ve claimed it once before.”
A miserable pause ensued.
In that gloomy silence, I searched his face. His expression was equal parts intrigued and guarded. I could see the wheels of his mind spinning. I considered telling him that our ancestors—his and mine—have been mingling in the Matrix of Literature since time immemorial and that, metaphysically speaking, he and I cohabit the Pyramid of Exile where he, in his privileged position relative to mine, is afforded a great deal of oxygen as well as the good graces of those below him, like me, who shoulder his weight. At this, I pictured my mother buried under the stone house that had come down on her head, and I heard her words echo across a great distance. Who will marry her? Who will feed her once we are dead? I nearly said, We have all the necessary ingredients for an arranged marriage! But before I had a chance to speak, Ludo plowed ahead with that linear, bureaucratic mind of his.
“Did you get any sleep on the plane?” he asked. He maneuvered around me and crossed to the back of the car, his gestures confident, calculated, precise.